c
 



 


  





In a stock market prospectus uncovered by education author Jonathan Kozol, the

Montgomery Securities group explains to Corporate America the lure of privatizing
education. Kozol writes:
³The education industry,´ according to these analysts, ³represents, in our opinion, the
final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control´ that have either
voluntarily opened or, they note in pointed terms, have ³been forced´ to open up to
private enterprise. Indeed, they write, ³the education industry represents the largest
market opportunity´ since health-care services were privatized during the 1970¶s.... From
the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, ³The
K±12 market is the Big Enchilada.´ 1

The idea that our education system should serve the needs of the free market and even be
run by private interests is not new. ³Those parts of education,´ wrote the economist
Adam Smith in his famous 1776 work, The Wealth of Nations, ³for the teaching of which
there are not public institutions, are generally the best-taught.´ More recently, Milton
2

Friedman introduced the idea of market-driven education in his 1962 book Capitalism
and Freedom. With the economic downturn of the early 1970s, Friedman¶s ultra-right-
wing free-market ideas would become guiding principles for the U.S. government and be
forced onto states throughout the world. The push toward privatization and deregulation,
two of the key tenets of what is known as neoliberalism, haven¶t just privatized formerly
public services; they have unabashedly channeled public money into private coffers.
³Philanthropreneurs,´ corporations, and ideologues are currently using charter schools to
3

accomplish these goals in education.

Friedman chose as his last battle before dying in 2006 to use his clout to push for the
privatization of New Orleans¶ public schools. He advocated for vouchers²government-
4

funded certificates permitting parents to send their child to the school of their choice²
but those who support his ideas have switched tracks slightly, pushing now for charter
schools.

A charter school is any school that is funded publicly but governed by institutions outside
the public school system. A company, a non-governmental organization, a university, or
any group of people who write a charter can become autonomous from a public school
board and control the budget, curriculum, and select the group of students in a school.
They receive public money, and, in exchange, they set out quantifiable results that they
will achieve. One quarter of charter schools are run by for-profit operators (called EMOs,
Educational Management Organizations), but most are run by nonprofit entities (usually
grouped under CMOs, Charter Management Organizations.) 5
Charter schools take many different forms²³independent´ charter schools, those that are
overseen only by the state board of education, and ³dependent´ charter schools, those that
report directly to the local school board. In both cases there is little oversight. There is
also a difference between freestanding, ³start-up´ charters that are created from scratch,
and conversions, where a charter operator takes over all (or part) of a previously existing
public school, building and all.

Credit for the concept of charter schools has been given, depending on the source, to Ray
Budde, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and Al Shanker, the conservative
leader of the American Federation of Teachers. But the early pioneers of the ³small
schools´ movement, which has been transformed to some extent into the charter
movement, were progressives who believed²rightly²that bureaucracy and mandates
were harming children. Most of the early small schools were intended to be
³laboratories´ that could create ³best practices´ and pressure all public schools to adopt
the same. People like Deborah Meier, who helped to create Central Park East Elementary
School in Harlem, believed that they could create better schools by winning a degree of
autonomy from school districts. And in many cases they did. The impulse today to win
autonomy from school-district bureaucracy, mind-numbing standardized curriculum, and
stifling and militaristic climates is even stronger, since No Child Left Behind legislation
has accelerated these trends.

But many of the original small schools have largely been dismantled. They have
collapsed or been taken apart under the pressure of the enormous weight of
standardization pushed since No Child Left Behind. Many have also been gobbled up by
the corporate sector.

An important book by Michael and Susan Klonsky, early participants in Chicago¶s small
schools movement, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society,
tells an important story. The Klonskys, longtime advocates of small and autonomous
schools, chronicle in great detail how the concept of ³autonomy´²which the pioneers
had hoped would mean democracy²turned into privatization when it crashed into the
slick and well-funded strategists of the ³Ownership Society.´

The first decentralizing wave of Chicago school reform was decimated by the 1995
mayoral takeover that saw many of the leaders of the small schools movement recruited
into the district administration, charter school organization, or the foundations. Others
were encouraged to become charter school operators themselves²and did. Surviving
small schools were pressured to give up many of their innovations and conform to
standardized, and even scripted, modes of instruction and assessment. 6

Still, because the noble intentions of some of the pioneers of the charter school
movement (to create laboratories that prove what all educators know: that creativity,
individual attention, and curricular relevance are the roots of good education) took shape
so recently, and because there are some good charter schools, many progressives are
disoriented in the current climate. Teachers who support the idea of public education,
while recognizing the horrible state of some of our schools, aren¶t sure what to do or
what position to take when their unions fail to oppose charters, or worse, even endorse
them. Some of the best books on the topic, like á
 
     
  

, published by  

, provide a wealth of crucial

information and perspectives for those concerned with education. While it argues that
³school reform cannot be isolated from solving society¶s larger injustices,´ it is
ambivalent about the impact of charter schools: ³The question facing the charter school
movement is whether it will fulfill its founding promise of reform that empowers the
powerless, or whether it will become a vehicle to further enrich the powerful and stratify
our schools.´ Founding promises notwithstanding, an honest look at the balance of forces
7

inside the charter movement makes a strong case for the latter. In another example, Small
Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society ends up supporting the
supposedly pro-union charter school Green Dot.

Liberals who support the idea of charter schools give cover to politicians who champion
privatization schemes. One of the main platforms for Barack Obama¶s presidential
campaign is support for charter schools. He told Teach for America, ³I have been a big
fan of public charter schools throughout my career. In the Illinois legislature, I was a
leading advocate of public charters and helped pass legislation that authorized Chicago to
create 15 new charter schools. I¶ve said before that more resources alone will not
improve our schools.´ In a speech to the National Education Association this summer,
8

Obama made two concrete policy suggestions about education²teacher bonuses based
on students¶ test scores, if the unions approve (merit pay by another name), and an
increase in charter schools. Not surprisingly, Republican presidential candidate John
McCain agreed totally, adding only that any obstacles to the expansion of charters should
be wiped away. The candidates both recognize that charter schools can shift the blame for
bad schools onto ³bad management,´ and can be used to justify the underfunding of
public schools. They recognize that the dominant force within the charter school
movement is that of corporate and nonprofit entrepreneurs. And so should we.

If we recognize the rapid acceleration of corporate-style charters, and admit that

progressive forces are dwarfed by the billions of dollars invested in this movement by the
private sector, we should try to group our forces around a completely different movement
with a different vision rather than trying to recapture the charter movement (if it were
ever ours).

Charter schools are, according to Kozol, a bridge toward vouchers:

In the long run, charter schools are being strategically used to pave the way for vouchers.
The voucher advocates, who are very powerful and funded by right-wing foundations and
families, recognize that the word ³voucher´ has been successfully discredited.... They
have now shrewdly decided the best way to break down resistance to vouchers is by
supporting charters, which represents a halfway step in the same direction. One of the
intentions of this, by creating selective institutions, usually with extra forms of funding, is
to discredit the entire public enterprise in America. We already have the privatization of
the military, as we¶ve seen with the private military contractors in Iraq; we¶ve seen the
privatization of the prison system. Well, the next step is the privatization of public
schools. It¶s a matter of ideology. In rare occasions, a charter school created by teachers
in the public system and in collaboration with activist parents in the community have had
at least short-term success.... They tend very quickly²even when they¶re started by
teachers with the best intentions²to enter into collaboration with the private sector. 9

È

  


 

Today more than one million children attend some four thousand charter schools
nationally.10# The Chicago Teachers Union has shrunk by 10 percent since the onset of
Renaissance 2010, a program to break away one hundred schools from the Chicago
Public School District. In Los Angeles 7 percent of children in public school, 45,000
students, attend charter schools. And that number is growing rapidly: in California,
11

charter schools grew by 13.2 percent in 2006/07, increasing to 617 schools. Joel Klein,
12

chancellor of schools in the New York public school system, has announced his intention
that all of New York¶s schools should be charters. Thirty percent of the students in
13

Dayton, Ohio, attend charter schools. About 30 percent of the children in Washington,
14

D.C., attend these schools, and 9 percent in Arizona. Georgia has sixty charter schools,
double what it had in 2005. Florida has 334, and Texas 237. 15

The different pace at which states and districts are becoming ³charterized´ depends on
the differing state laws governing charters and the degree of centralization in these areas.
For example, charter schools seem to be moving most quickly in areas where control of
the school district is centralized in the hands of a mayor or has been put into receivership
by the state. The pace is especially quick in areas where local politicians have an explicit
pro-charter and free market agenda, in areas where people are more disenfranchised (like
in Washington, D.C.) or in areas where a ³shock´ (to use Naomi Klein¶s metaphor) has
wiped the slate clean for charter laboratories (like in New Orleans).

In New Orleans, 57 percent of public school students attended charter schools at the end
of 2007, and that percentage has probably increased. Before Hurricane Katrina, New
Orleans Public School Board ran 123 schools. After the storm, they were taken over by
the state of Louisiana and most were turned over to subcontractors. There is now a three-
tier school district; select students attend publicly funded charters, others attend state-run
schools (the Recovery School District) with a student-to-teacher ratio as high as 40:1 in
some schools and no local school board to complain to, and still another group attends the
least desirable Orleans Parish schools, where there is a security guard for every thirty-
seven students.16
An important article by Bill Quigley describes this system and tells how Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings and the U.S. Department of Education had already put
$20.9 million in special funds on the table for charter schools by September 30, 2005.
(Another $20 million followed.) About two months later all 7,500 public school teachers
17

and other school employees in New Orleans were fired and forced to reapply for their
jobs, effectively busting the United Teachers of New Orleans. Over a year and a half
later, as chronicled in the New Orleans Teachers Union Report R

  
R   
 R   


 
   
  !
  , well over three hundred students were still on wait-lists to gain admission to
public schools. The shortages of classroom spaces in the public schools were so bad in
2007 that the NAACP filed suit on behalf of a wait-listed student. But the money was
18

readily available, and the red tape not so thick, for privately run charters.

In one heroic case, parents, teachers, and students began squatting in Martin Luther King
Jr. School in the Lower 9th Ward, in an attempt to force the reopening of the school.
They were offered several million dollars if they would reopen²as a charter. In such
19

cases, teachers and parents who decide to form charter schools don¶t do so out of hostility
to public schools, but out of necessity. In New Orleans in particular, this is a conscious
design on the part of the charter movement.

`




This flood tide of charter schools leads some to believe that our school system may soon
be wholly broken apart and effectively privatized; but what about the role of public
education in supplying a steady stream of workers that have basic proficiencies in math
and English necessary in the workplace?

Charter schools fit the needs of the establishment perfectly. Education is still compulsory
and paid for by the state. Children are still controlled while their parents are at work, and
this is still supported by our regressive tax structure. And charter schools are excellent
teachers of free-market, ³personal responsibility´ ideology. The American Dream is
promised to all those who strive to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. If you want your
child to get ahead, make sure that he or she is one of the lucky few to get a seat in a
charter school. For the rich, charters have added benefits; they are being used to
dismantle the power of teachers¶ unions, and they are excellent tools for channeling tax
money into the pockets of enterprising individuals. This is true even when the charter
schools are run by nonprofit companies. And no matter what the rhetoric dished out for
public consumption, siphoning public money into private hands is the goal, as the
statement by the Montgomery Securities group quoted above shows.

According to U.S. Census data, well over $800 billion is spent on education, public and
private, at all levels in the United States each year. This makes it roughly the same size
20

as the U.S. trade deficit with China. The private sector wants to get its hands on this
money. Along with politicians, it is determined to break the power of the teachers¶ unions
and to attack one of the last bastions of decently paid American workers. The budget
problems resulting from the current recession will provide them cover in doing this.

The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter
schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them. The Waltons
21

specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. ³Empowering parents to

choose among competing schools,´ said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart¶s founder, ³will
catalyze improvement across the entire K±12 education system.´ According to a
22

National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, ³Some critics argue
that it is the beginning of the µWal-Martization¶ of education, and a move to for-profit
schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton
owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education
Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and
private schools as well as public schools.´ Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm,
23

famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from
working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child
labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic
development subsidies from state and local governments. Its so-called philanthropy
24

seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries.

As for a coordinated effort, the private incursion into public schools is being pushed by a
band of jackals grouped around Bill Gates and the $2 billion that his Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation have sunk into the education ³reform´ movement. The foundation
funded a 2006 study by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce
called

 

 , ³signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent
politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents,´ which

called for a series of measures including: (a) replacing public schools with what the
report called ³contract schools,´ which would be charter schools writ large; (b)
eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards²their role would be to write and
sign the authorizing agreements for the contract schools; (c) eliminating teacher pensions
and slashing health benefits; and (d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit
examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed
(i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16).
25

In the beginning, the Gateses used their dollars and employees to push school districts
such as Los Angeles to break up mega-high schools into ³small learning communities.´
But now they are advising superintendents to give up that project and go straight for
independent charters. Gates¶ $60 million project, ³Ed in ¶08: Strong American Schools,´ 26

will use the elections this year to influence politicians to accept their three mandates:
standardization of curriculum nationally, merit pay for teachers, and more time in
schools. The campaign¶s money comes from Bill Gates and Eli Broad, a Los Angeles real
estate magnate. Roy Romer, the former superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified
School District, is its spokesman, and it counts among its supporters a diverse crowd²
from Rod Paige, the former secretary of education, who once called teachers¶ unions
³terrorist organizations,´ to Janet Murguia, president and CEO of the corporate-backed
National Council of La Raza. It trumpets success stories, like its ³Mission Possible:
Greensboro, North Carolina,´ where 383 teachers were paid bonuses in direct relation to
27

their students¶ test scores.

The movement also has regional boosters. In Los Angeles, Eli Broad, the billionaire who
tried to engineer the mayoral takeover of Los Angeles schools, gave Steve Barr and his
nonprofit Green Dot $10 million. Last spring Green Dot took over the 2,600-student
Locke High School from the Los Angeles Unified School District and has a goal of
expanding to forty-one schools throughout Los Angeles. Green Dot is supported by
28

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who invited Green Dot executive Marshall Tuck onto his
five-person educational advisory board. Villaraigosa is currently pushing for a $7 billion
bond measure for the November ballot in Los Angeles, $450 million of which would be
earmarked for charter schools if his friend (and former school board member) Caprice
Young has her way. It¶s not surprising that Green Dot¶s ties with Democratic Party
29

politicians are so strong, since founder Steve Barr cut his political teeth campaigning for
Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, and Michael Dukakis. 30

Globally, companies are being coached about how to get their hands on state money
allocated for public services. An important new book called  "
# 

  !  $

 %
  chronicles an international movement
to privatize education. ³Education corporations´ are popping up in China on the ashes of
31

public elementary schools. ³City Academies´ in England are being handed over to
private sponsors. Reports shared among these policy-makers offer strategies for how to
accomplish this deregulation. One such report is ³The Politics of Education Reform:
Bolstering the Supply and Demand: Overcoming Institutional Blocks,´ published by the
World Bank in 1999. (The institutional ³blocks´ are, of course, teachers¶ organizations.)
32

There is no monolithic bloc of evil government and corporate forces marching along a
single road map to privatization. Some charter schools were created on the genuine
initiative of community members or teachers and parents. In some schools, like ones
based specifically on antiracist curriculum, students are undoubtedly learning in a better
atmosphere than they were before. But in Los Angeles, for example, while these
represent only a handful of the 147 charters, dominated by EMOs and CMOs, they are
used to blunt criticism of the dominant, corporate trend in the charter school movement.

There are a few pernicious assumptions shared by almost all charter operators, large and
small, for-profit and nonprofit, dependent and independent, start-ups or conversions. The
first assumption is that government education budgets will stay the same or continue to
decrease. If it is given that public schools will be underfunded, the charter movement
touts the belief that schools can succeed by having better management²less bureaucracy
and corruption. The second shared assumption is that there is a role for the private sector
in decision-making. Those who realize that money does make the difference in schools
are attracted by the lucrative ³partnership´ contracts and money being dangled in front of
charter schools by corporate interests. Others simply believe that private forces will be
more efficient managers of schools than public school boards. And the corporate interests
simply want to get their hands on the money. But all concede a role for private forces in
running the schools. A third premise is that teachers¶ right to collective representation
and bargaining is an institutional ³block´ to progress, because teachers are in some way
to blame for the abysmal state of the schools. We have to push back against these
assumptions if we are to win quality education for all.

On what grounds do we object to charter schools?

È


 
   



 






  
 

 



 














 






 
 
 


Edison Schools Incorporated is one of the largest for-profit charter school companies. It
ran twenty schools in Philadelphia alone until it was discredited this year. With board
members like John Chubb of the Hoover Institution and Brookings Institution, it made a
bald-faced attempt to turn millions of dollars in profits by controlling 157 schools. (Not
very successfully, though; it was traded on the NASDAQ for four years but only showed
one quarter of profitability. ) The most fundamental problem with a private model of
33

education is that a company¶s profits depend directly on cost-cutting. The cheaper the
services they provide, just as in private prisons and hospitals, the more profit they turn.
So there is always an incentive to do things on the cheap²poorly maintained physical
plant and equipment, low pay for teachers and other staff, and larger class sizes mean
bigger rates of return.

The dynamic works in fundamentally similar ways with nonprofit entities. The pressure
to cut costs in order to have money left over for expansion forces nonprofit entities to act
in a similar fashion to their for-profit cousins. Every nonprofit charter operator is under
immense pressure right now to expand as quickly as possible and to measure success by
how quickly they are able to replicate themselves. The newest mandate from the Bill and
Melinda Gates Foundation is that we need to close thousands of broken inner-city schools
and replace them with charters. There is fierce competition over who will get the
contracts, especially among nonprofits. And nonprofits are, of course, allowed to pay
their administrators very high salaries as well as keeping a small profit.

And then there is corruption. Celerity, a nonprofit charter school that made an attempt to
co-locate on the campus of Wadsworth Elementary in Los Angeles, contracts out all its
services to a for-profit firm, Nova, run by the same owner. This backdoor model²of a
nonprofit funneling dollars to a separate, for-profit entity²is common. Kent Fischer
explained it in the &    :

The profit motive drives business«. More and more, it¶s driving Florida school reform.
The vehicle: charter schools. This was not the plan. These schools were to be ³incubators
of innovation,´ free of the rules that govern traditional districts. Local school boards
would decide who gets the charters, which spell out how a school will operate and what it
will teach. To keep this deal, lawmakers specified that only nonprofit groups would get
charters. But six years later, profit has become pivotal.... For-profit corporations create
nonprofit foundations to obtain the charters, and then hire themselves to run the schools. 34

Whether it¶s technically legal, ³contracting out´ or direct corruption and profiteering,
abounds. In their article ³The Corporate Surge Against Public Schools,´ Steven Miller
and Jack Gerson cite many cases of such corruption. Brenda Belton, charter oversight
chief for the D.C. Board of Education, admitted to arranging $650,000 in sweetheart
contracts for herself and her friends, and C. Steven Cox, CEO of a large chain of charter
schools in California, was indicted on 113 felony counts of misappropriating public
funds.35

c 
 
 



As far as teaching American kids high-level skills to get them ready for the job market,
data conflict (at best) as to whether charter schools fail more often than public schools do.
The R '
 , in an editorial titled ³Exploding the Charter School Myth,´ uses
statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to argue that fourth-
graders in freestanding charter schools showed worse performance than their public
school counterparts in math and reading scores. (The data were different, however, for
those students in charter schools affiliated with public school districts.) As the editorial
argues, ³the problem with failing public schools is that they often lack both resources and
skilled, experienced teachers. While there are obvious exceptions, some charter schools
embark on a path that simply re-creates the failures that they were developed to
replace.´ 36

According to the important book Charter School Dustup: Examining the Evidence on
Enrollment and Achievement, a study published in 2005 by scholars with the Economic
37

Policy Institute and the Teachers¶ College at Columbia University, ³an analysis of
California found that socioeconomically disadvantaged Asian-origin and Latino students
in charter schools had composite test scores (literacy, mathematics, science, and social
studies) that were about 4 to 5 percent lower than their counterparts in public primary
schools.´ Overall, in every state besides Arizona, they found charter schools¶
performance is no higher than that of public schools in every demographic category. The
comparisons were no better for low-income Black students.
The charter school movement cooks the books to try and prove otherwise. KIPP Schools,
a nonprofit company that runs fifty-two schools nationwide and was formed in a
partnership between ex±Teach for America (an anti-union organization) teachers and
Donald Fisher, cofounder of Gap Inc., illustrates this point. It claims the highest test
scores in the Bronx. But one comparison found that 42 percent of entering fourth-graders
entering the KIPP school passed state reading tests, as compared to 25 percent for the
surrounding public schools. They are starting with a group of students who already have
better test scores.

In California, charter schools did worse than regular public schools at achieving their
Adequate Yearly Progress goals, even though those goals are flawed because they are set
by No Child Left Behind mandates. By a slightly better measure, ³academic
38

momentum,´ which tries to measure improvements in schools, 24.8 percent of charter

schools, and only 19.6 percent of public schools earned a ³high´ ranking. But by the
same token, 26.3 percent of charter schools got a ³poor´ ranking, as compared to only
19.6 percent of public schools. The best charter schools seem to be improving slightly
faster than California public schools, but a higher percentage of charter schools perform
poorly. Perhaps charter schools aren¶t the great equalizers that they claim to be.

È  
  

  
 
 
   
  

 
   

 






This is seen most acutely in New Orleans, where charter schools are in most cases
genuinely better than the public schools because they receive a higher rate of funding.
The charter schools funded by the Walton family, according to Liza Featherstone of the
Nation, receive a higher per-pupil allotment than public schools. They are then used as a
39

stick with which to beat public schools as though they were on a level playing field.

Additionally, at Granada Hills High School charter in Los Angeles, the governing board
has been able to increase the amount of money flowing into the classrooms by cutting out
the larger district bureaucracy to an extent. The fact that schools with more money can do
better simply serves to make our point: that more money will make a better school. They
all should have it, not a select few. If this means dramatically cutting bureaucracy
everywhere, then that¶s what we should stand for²not eviscerating public schooling.

The point is that public schools are of poor quality when they are underfunded; the poor
quality is then used as an excuse for gutting public education even more. Using classic
sharp business practices, the promoters of for-profit schooling are willing to pump some
money into the charter schools in order to ³prove´ they are better, only to cut corners and
boost profits once the charters have won the day.

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At KIPP schools, like many other charters, a condition of admission is that students¶
parents have to spend a certain amount of volunteer time at the school. This automatically
excludes children whose parents already spend the least time with them (due to working
multiple jobs, lack of child care, or any number of difficult issues). While in some cases
strictly competitive admissions cannot be used in charters receiving federal funds
(although the rules are very flexible, as in New Orleans), these schools can select their
students and transfer or expel students with less due process than they are afforded in
regular schools.
This means, firstly, that charter schools select for students with the most resourceful
parents, the children who already have a head start in the race. Miranda Restovic told the
New Orleans Times-Picayune that she felt like she was applying to college when she
tried to get her three-year-old into a charter school. ³Although I am thrilled with the
increased public school options, I am skeptical as to the (admissions) processes being
friendly to all families,´ Restovic said. ³It¶s really difficult if you don¶t have the time to
make constant inquiries and don¶t have connections at the school to call and prod.´ 40

A study of California charter schools by USC bears out Restovic¶s observation. The
parents of students The parents of students in California charter schools are more
educated than their public school counterparts. Sixty percent of parents whose children
attend charter schools had attended at least some college, as compared to 54 percent of
parents of their public school counterparts. Forty percent of children in charter schools in
California are on free or reduced lunch, as compared to the 50 percent average in
California public schools overall.41

English language learners (ELL) are less likely to go to charter schools; in California, 16
percent of charter school students are ELL, as compared to 25 percent in other public
schools. Charters, whether consciously or unconsciously, select for those students who
42

are going to boost their test scores the most. Once English language learners get to
charter schools, they may not be getting the services that they need: 44.9 percent of
charter schools in the USC study ranked poorly for reclassification of students to Fluent
English Proficient.43

Secondly, charters¶ ability to select students fundamentally changes the dynamics of the
relationship between parents and schools. Parents of struggling students, or those who
disagree with the charter board, or who don¶t fulfill obligations for the school are always
under threat of transfer to another school. They don¶t have the same potential power and
due process that they do in a public school that their child is required to attend by law.

¢




È
  


Green Dot, the Broad- (and Gates-?) funded nonprofit that runs twelve schools in Los
Angeles, takes over schools by promising equality and evoking civil rights language like
³grass-roots control.´ For teachers, it promises more local control over curriculum. We
want to get away, it argues to teachers hungry for such promises, from mandates and
scripts. The problem is that this academic freedom is a lie. These schools are measured
by the same standardized tests that all schools are, and they are well aware of it. There is
no less²and arguably more²pressure for a charter to ³teach to the test´ since their
raison d¶être is that they can help students to ³perform better.´

Green Dot promises more academic freedom and local control. A couple of paragraphs
from Green Dot¶s own website, however, illustrate the limitations of these promises.

While the Home Office provides Recommended Practices to schools, principals and
teachers have ultimate autonomy to decide whether to follow those Recommended
Practices or take different approaches«.

Local control works in Green Dot¶s school model because schools and all stake-holders
within them are held accountable for student results. !% ! 
   





 

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  !

 !


  & Green Dot¶s accountability system
defines quarterly and annual performance targets for each school and teacher as well as
the period of time that a school or teacher can under-perform before Green Dot¶s
Education Team will intervene with supports and/or take away a school¶s local control. 44

[emphasis added]

In addition, Green Dot can, unlike regular public schools, refuse to admit new students if
it is full.

In the agreement between Green Dot and the Asocia?cion de Maestros/NEA/AFT, the
bargaining represen?tative of the teachers, it is made clear in no uncertain terms that ³the
Board maintains final authority over decisions regarding adminstrative decisions.´ Unlike
most charter school companies, Green Dot accepts unions. However, according to a R 
'
  report, ³The union representing Green Dot teachers...has a 33-page contract
that offers competitive salaries but no tenure, and it allows class schedule and other
instructional flexibility outlawed by the 330-page contract governing most Los Angeles
schools.´45

An NPR report describes the tremendous pressure put on teachers in a KIPP school.

Many of the teachers here are young; Feinberg is in her third year. Charter schools have
the freedom to hire whom they want, and for this school, being young and enthusiastic
counts for a lot. Feinberg knows that she and the school face tremendous pressure to
improve the test scores of the city¶s most challenging students. ³But it¶s great pressure, I
mean it¶s pressure that makes you work harder, that gives you a sense of urgency every
day that they must learn these skills,´ Feinberg says. ³If you don¶t produce the results
that need to be produced, it¶s very possible that you could lose your job.´ 46

The same report explains that during the nine-hour school days at KIPP academies,
students practice ³call and response´ style learning; in other words, they are taught to
³respond in unison´ as the teacher snaps her fingers; a traditional rote method not
particularly designed to encourage teacher or student creativity. The picture of
conformity is reinforced by the fact that most charter school companies require their
students to wear uniforms.

O  


 
  

 






  
  

 

!

"
 

 




 
 

It¶s clear that the high-powered think tanks and business-driven efforts to promote charter
schools are part of a package that includes eliminating teachers¶ unions. In New York
City, for example, right-wing foundations, with the support of billionaire Mayor Michael
Bloomberg and his Department of Education chancellor Joel Klein, are working to keep
unions out of the city¶s charter schools. In November 2005 the Atlantic Legal
Foundation²³a legal arm of the most stridently anti-union corporations and allied far-
right interest groups´ ²held a seminar in New York City at the prestigious Harvard Club
47

to discuss ³union prevention´ in the city¶s forty-seven charter schools. The conference¶s
48

opening session was entitled, ³Leveling the Playing Field: What New York Charter
School Leaders Need to Know About Union Organizing.´ Among the scheduled speakers
at a main panel were Caryl Cohen, a representative of New York¶s Department of
Education¶s charter school arm, the New York City Center for Charter School
Excellence, and Norman Atkins, one of the the founders and leaders of two charter school
networks Chancellor Joel Klein has invited to New York. According to Atkins, the
consensus of the panel was that ³good charter schools organize themselves in ways that
keep unions out.´ 49

³Local control´ should include the right to teacher self-representation as well as an

independent voice for parents and students. But most charters, even those that wear the
progressive mantle, are hostile to this idea. An excellent example is the Los Angeles
Leadership Academy run by Roger Lowenstein. It is a ³social justice school´ that
encourages teachers to use lessons from movements for social change, and encourages
students to attend antiwar demonstrations. The school recruits teachers who have been
involved in community organizing and who are committed to progressive, antiracist
pedagogy.

The teachers learned a lesson in social justice, though, when they tried to win the right to
representation and collective bargaining by affiliating to the California Teachers
Association. Roger Lowenstein hired high-paid anti-union law firms to keep the union
out in what one veteran union organizer called ³one of the toughest oppositions a
teachers¶ union has possibly ever faced.´ Lowenstein argued to the Public Employee
50

Relations Board that it should have no role in overseeing the union election or
investigating unfair labor practices because the Leadership Academy is ³not a public
school.´ If he was referring to the decision-making process²rather than the source of
funding, which is, of course, public²he is absolutely right. Teachers quickly found out
that the school¶s advocacy for struggle, protest, and collectively ³speaking truth to
power´ rang hollow when it came to their right to organize themselves.

The main source of poor school quality (and poor performance) is that public schools, at
least in poor and working-class communities, are deliberately underfunded and resource
starved, precisely in communities where more resources are needed for these schools to
succeed; they are then expected to perform according to criteria that their lack of funding
makes difficult for them to fulfill. The failure is then used to justify more public school
cuts and the diversion of public funds into charter schools.

The next biggest factor in the quality of the school is the quality of teaching. This is
directly related to the ability of teachers to shape the curriculum, the amount of
collaborative planning time and individual tutoring time that they have, and their rate of
pay and experience. All these things increase with the power of teachers¶ unions. So if
one accepts the idea that unions can play the role of fighting for better quality schools,
more democratic accountability of schools, and better compensation for teachers, and that
these are essential for good schools, then unions for teachers should be a community
demand. This may not happen, however, until teachers¶ unions prove through action that
they support the needs and struggles of the parents and students in their communities. But
teachers cannot have a serious voice in any process of school improvement unless they
have the right to collective bargaining.

The slow destruction of union power that occurs when subcontracting creates lots of
small workplaces²in place of large, highly unionized ones²has been a fact across many
industries. ³Whipsawing´ is a term used to describe the effect on unions like the UAW
when workers in smaller, spun-off shops get inferior contracts, and those contracts are
used to pressure workers in bigger plants to accept similar concessions. The same could
apply to the effect of charter schools in education.

Some suggest, then, that we have to seek out ³pro-union´ charter operators and make
deals with them. But if we are speaking of privately run CMOs, then genuine power for
their teachers would threaten the board¶s hegemony in the schools. Some, like Green Dot,
are willing to allow teachers a contract, and claim to be pro-union. But in their contract
with the AMU/CTA/NEA teachers¶ union, one can find few guarantees of any kind of
real teacher voice (in the form of voting). According to the contract between Green Dot
and the ³union,´ in effect until 2010,
It is understood and agreed that the Board retains all of its powers and authority to direct,
manage and control to the full extent of the charter school law and the regulations of a
501.C3 California corporation. Input from the staff will be considered and decisions will
be derived in a collaborative model; final decisions will rest with the Board. Included in,
but not limited to, those duties are the right to: ...establish educational policies with
regard to admitting students; ...determine the number of personnel and types of personnel
needed; ...establish budget procedures and determine budgetary allocations; contract out
work and take action on any matter in the event of an emergency. 51

The Board will make all staffing decisions. By contrast, the United Teachers of Los
Angeles contract with Los Angeles Unified District requires faculty votes on key aspects
of running the school, like the schedule and certain discretionary budget items, and
guarantees that class assignments will be chosen by the teachers, through seniority, and
not arbitrarily by the administration. This vision of unionism, typified by SEIU (a
52

representative of which sits on Green Dot¶s board) is antithetical to real power or

democracy for teachers. A large union cuts a deal with the employer, quickly begins to
collect dues from members, and in exchange for ³neutrality´ on the part of the boss gives
away key workplace rights. Green Dot specifically aims to hire younger, more
inexperienced teachers and gives incentives for senior teachers to leave.

Many suspect Green Dot of signing somewhat toothless union contracts as a way of
keeping more combative unions out. This wouldn¶t be surprising given the presence of
SEIU on their board of directors. SEIU is currently engaged in undermining the
legitimate teachers¶ union of Puerto Rico (the FMPR) in the wake of the strike that the
FMPR led last spring. After the strike, the Puerto Rican government decertified the
FMPR. SEIU helped the Asociacion de Maestros (coincidentally, the same name as the
teachers¶ union at Green Dot schools) to try to win representation of the Puerto Rican
teachers. The FMPR was not allowed to contest them. 53

þ 
 



New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein has openly declared his wish to make all
New York public schools charter schools. Rather than oppose the idea outright, then-
United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten chose to play ball on the
chancellor¶s field. In addition to inviting Steve Barr of Green Dot to New York to partner
with the UFT in opening Green Dot schools, she also conceded that New York teachers
would be willing to accept some form of merit pay. Merit pay hooks teacher bonuses
(money that otherwise could be spent on salaries) to student test performance.

If this ³appeasement´ strategy was designed to convince Klein to stop blaming teachers
for the problems in New York¶s schools, it didn¶t work. Shortly thereafter, Klein teamed
up with civil rights figure Al Sharpton to launch the Education Equality Project, whose
main goal is to remove the ³block´ that the teachers¶ union supposedly creates to
³reform.´ Sharpton said, ³But we cannot say that we¶re going to close this achievement
gap but protect ineffective teachers or principals or school chiefs or not challenge
parents.´ Perhaps if the teachers in New York had decided to build genuine alliances
54

with New York parents²particularly in communities of color²to fight for access to

more resources, against dictatorial mandates, and to define what ³quality education´
means from the ground up, then Sharpton wouldn¶t have gotten any traction for blaming
the teachers. A more convincing explanation for failure of Black students is gross
underfunding and pervasive segregation.

Weingarten may also justify her actions on the basis that we have to make concessions to
some charter schools²and so we may as well pick the ³pro-union´ ones. But rather than
trying to play an appeasement game with charters, we should oppose them. The charter
school movement may have to slow down under the weight of their own contradictions²
they promise better scores but can¶t deliver because their modus operandi rests on
stripping teachers of their rights and, in many cases, maximizing profits. But another
factor that will determine the pace of privatization is the amount and quality of struggle
that we can wage, and the clarity with which we can wage it. And whether, in the
process, we can begin to cooperate as parents, teachers, and students to formulate those
demands that would begin to shape public education to meet the goals and vision that
most people have for it.

A few examples illustrate the kind of struggles that might hold out hope for our side. In
February 2008, 26,000 Puerto Rican teachers struck for more than a week against the
colonial government¶s plans for education. The strike had many demands²opposing
Law 45 that outlaws public sector strikes on the island, just salaries for teachers, and the
right to democratically choose their representation in collective bargaining. Among those
demands, though, was one to stop the creep of charters into Puerto Rican education. At
the conclusion of the strike, an agreement was signed by teachers¶ union president Rafael
Feliciano-Hernandez and the minister of education on the island guaranteeing to keep
charter schools out. The agreement will be hard to enforce, but it established a precedent
of teachers fighting the seemingly inevitable tide of privatization. (It¶s also important to
note that the Puerto Rican teachers¶ resistance to charters began in 1993, which may
explain why they¶ve staved them off). Yet, as we can see from the above-mentioned joint
attack from Puerto Rico¶s governor and SEIU, the struggle is far from over.

The other examples are smaller in scope. In 2004, as many of Chicago public schools
were threatened with mass closures, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system developed
a plan to close Senn High School on the North Side and turn it into a Naval Academy
charter school. The ominous move to establish military charter schools²spurred by the
military¶s shrinking pool of willing volunteers as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind
on²is not limited to Senn, nor to Chicago alone, as one 2008 report outlines:

Chicago has the most militarized public school system in the nation, with Cadet Corps for
students in middle school, over 10,000 students participating in JROTC programs, over
1,000 students enrolled in one of the five, soon-to-be six autonomous military high
schools, and hundreds more attending one of the nine military high schools that are called
³schools within a school.´ Chicago now has a Marine Military Academy, a Naval
Academy, and three army high schools. When an air force high school opens next year,
Chicago will be the only city in the nation to have academies representing all branches of
the military. And Chicago is not the only city moving in this direction: the public school
systems of other urban centers with largely Black and immigrant low-income students,
including Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Oakland, are being similarly reformed²and
deformed²through partnerships with the Department of Defense. 55

According to Jesse Sharkey, a teacher at Senn,

In [some] ways, our school is a remarkable community resource, with plenty of morale.
Our students come from 70 nationalities, speak 57 different languages and still maintain a
sense of unity and mutual respect. Senn students have performed 70,000 hours of
community service over the past five years and have been recognized with a national
service award. Senn has also developed some of the city¶s most successful academic
programs for at-risk kids. So instead of waiting for the ax to fall, we began to fight back.
We researched the effect that the military takeover would have on our school and
community, and wrote fact sheets. We made flyers about our concerns and put up 3,500
of them, with another 500 in Spanish. We reached out and met with community
organizations, launched a Web site, wrote press releases and organized to get people out
to support us. On October 5, we brought about 700 people out to the CPS forum at our
school. The mood in the room was electric. Students had been preparing all week²they
had written speeches, drawn dozens of handmade signs and brought along many of their
parents. When CPS officials tried to show us a slick promotional video about the Navy
ROTC program, the room rebelled. The entire audience stood up and turned its back to
the presentation.
56

In the end, the Senn students, parents, and teachers won a partial victory. The school
stayed open. However, in compliance with a December 2004 decision by the school
board, one wing of their building was occupied by the Naval Academy. The charter fixed
up their wing of the dilapidated building, including adding new air-conditioning, new
computers, and science labs. The academy students, housed in the same building as
³regular´ Senn students, wear their own uniforms, have their own teachers, and operate
by their own rules. The body of Senn was saved through the activism of its community²
but one of its limbs has been infected by the viral creep of the charter movement working
in conjunction with the military.

In a similar vein, teachers and parents in Los Angeles mounted a fight against charter
takeover of school space in 2008. In California, Proposition 39 states that charter schools
should be given access to space in public education buildings that is not being utilized.
This seems like a strange concept in a city where tens of thousands of students go to
³year-round´ schools due to overcrowding, and trailer-like bungalows have taken over
the recreation areas of most schools to create extra space. Nevertheless, forty charters
completed applications to co-locate on Los Angeles United School District (LAUSD)
campuses in the fall of 2008. They had receptive friends on the school board. However,
in some notable cases, they were stymied. A group of more than seventy parents as well
as teachers from Wadsworth Elementary spoke at and protested an LAUSD board
meeting to keep Celerity Charter School off their campus²and won. Similar organizing
happened at Logan Elementary, where a proposal to house middle-school children on an
elementary school campus was being considered. In fact, according to an estimate by
Crenshaw High School UTLA Chapter Chair Alex Caputo-Pearl, parents, students, and
teachers at fifteen of the forty schools facing co-location with charters organized against
them. At the time of writing, only sixteen of the forty applications for co-location had
been accepted by LAUSD. The protests are widely seen as the reason why more charters
were not accepted onto LAUSD campuses.

It appears that the charter school movement can be opposed, but it has to be fought
school by school. In schools where there are parents, teachers, and students who
understand the issues and can oppose charter takeover, charters can be stopped. These
small struggles will not, however, stem the national tide until they are strong and viable
enough to cohere into a powerful movement for a different vision of public education.
The only way to challenge charter schools is to show that they are a stepping stone to
privatization, that is, to the denial of publicly funded education as a basic right for all.
Also, in their current status, in most instances, charters offer opportunities for private
interests to profit by siphoning state funds. We must show that public education suffers
not because it is public, but because it is poorly funded by states with other priorities,
such as funding corporate handouts.

Here are some ideas for what we can do to begin to win the battle for public education:

4#
!
  

We cannot accept the logic that the amount of money available to schools is fixed, even
in the current economic meltdown. At the state level, corporate tax rates are criminally
low, and at the federal level, a tiny fraction of the money going to the war in Iraq would
make giant strides toward fixing our schools. In every case the charter schools that do the
best are the ones that receive extra money (usually from private foundations who want to
see public schools replaced by charters). There is nothing complicated about the fact that
more resources make better schools. If politicians didn¶t believe this, they wouldn¶t send
their students to private schools that spend ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars more
per student per year than our public schools do. Granted, only a massive struggle on the
scale of the civil rights movement will force them to give us what we want for all
children, not just their own. Students should not have to compete to get into the best
schools while others are abandoned to horrible conditions in schools festering like
wounds in already devastated neighborhoods. All schools need to be made better.

$È!


!!

 
 
To date, none of the large teachers¶ unions has launched a public relations battle against
the charter takeover. Often the objection is that this is too politically difficult, since ³the
public supports charters.´ This is not surprising, though, given that no national force has
ever made the case against them. No doubt we¶ll lose a battle that we choose not to fight.

sÈ 
  
  


 



 



  



  

   )   & We welcome them into our unions, but must
demand that they have all the key contract provisions that larger locals have. We should
try to group them into larger bargaining units to avoid the fracturing of our power that
happens when we are balkanized. We also can¶t allow organizing to try to improve and
democratize these charter schools to rob resources from our large public schools. If we
wage these fights, charters can¶t gain the traction that they need to continue their
expansion. Teachers¶ unions need to resist the temptation to fall into an organizing model
that values representation at whatever cost²a model to which much of the rest of the
labor movement has resorted. If we don¶t have strong contracts that help to win better
conditions for students and teachers and democratize the decision-making process in the
schools, unions aren¶t worth much.

#
!

 


 

   

Charter schools are just the extreme end of the whole spectrum of the corporate takeover
of our schools. Already, schools that are wholly public are being forced into serving the
military and business interests of this country. The tendrils of Corporate America reach
deep into our schools via nepotistic contracts²from the $3 billion testing industry
accelerated under No Child Left Behind, to McGraw-Hill and its Reading First program
pushed through by the Bush administration. And as Jonathan Kozol chronicles in Shame
of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, teaching children
obedience and corporate values (such as kindergartners being asked to role-play
workplace managers) is, along with drill-and-kill methodologies, increasingly erasing all
the best practices that came out of the educational reforms of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. We
need to oppose mandates and all incursions of the private sector into the running of our
schools.

New visions for the kind of schools that we want for our children will rise out of the
struggles against the attacks that we are facing. This is fundamentally about fighting for
democracy in the schools.

At Woodland Hills Academy, the parents and teachers at the school have appealed for
(and won) a degree of autonomy from Los Angeles Unified School District, even though
the school is not a charter. They have set up a Humanities Academy that makes financial
and curricular decisions democratically. The school is known as a college- prep middle
school, and has very good performance by all measures. The example of Woodland Hills
Academy suggests that the things that are most tempting about some of the better
charters²control over what is taught, escape from drill-and-kill mentality, and
democratic decision-making²can be achieved inside the public school system as well,
by teachers, parents, and students organizing.

In other areas, too, teachers¶ unions have partnered with others to try to create innovative
schools that attempt to wriggle out from under the grasp of mandates and bureacratic
decisions. In Boston, the Pilot School project has done this, and in Los Angeles,
Innovation Division schools are experimenting with more collaborative and autonomous
decision-making within the schools. 57

Teachers who are committed to social justice should put themselves in the camp of those
who have fought through direct action for equal access to quality public education. Our
role models should reach from the former slaves who forced the Freedmen¶s Bureau to
create the first public schools in the South and the students who pushed for integration of
the public school system during the civil rights movement, to the undocumented students
fighting for access to public universities in the United States today.

As long as we have a system built on inequality, the policy makers will attempt to use
schools to institutionally and ideologically buttress the division between the haves and
have-nots. They will mostly succeed. But in the struggles to come for genuine equality,
access to schools to meet the needs of   !, not a select few among those
who live in poverty, will be a call and a slogan of our movements. For the vast majority,
this means quality education in public schools. Those who join that fight will determine
what the word ³quality´ means, and will have an opportunity to force these concessions
from policy makers until people decide that concessions are not enough.

 á


  *
#  &

1 Jonathan Kozol, ³The big enchilada,´ Harper¶s Magazine, August 2007.

2 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1937), 721.

3 Term coined by Steven Miller and Jack Gerson. Their article ³The corporate surge against public schools´ can be
found at www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.

4 See Milton Friedman, ³The promise of vouchers,´ Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2005.

5 Michael Klonsky and Susan Klonsky, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society (New
York: Routledge, 2008), 93.
6 Ibid.

7 Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson, and Stephanie Walters, eds. Keeping the Promise? The Debate
Over Charter Schools (Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools, 2008), xv.

8 Teach for America¶s alumni magazine, One Day, allowed alumni to submit questions for Obama and McCain,
www.teachforamerica.org/alumni/one_day/summer2008_electionwatch.htm.

9 ³Separate and unequal: America¶s apartheid schools,´ interview in ISR 45, Jan±Feb 2006.

10 American Federation of Teachers, ³Charter schools,´ www.aft.org/topics/charters.

11 Howard Blume, ³Ask a reporter,´ Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2008.

12 ³Charter schools indicators: A report from the Center on Educational Governance, University of Southern
California,´ www.usc.edu/dept/education/cegov/CSI_08_v6.pdf, 3.

13 One has to wonder whether this is because he recently received the $1 million Eli Broad Excellence in Education
award.

14 Bill Quigley, ³A special report on Katrina and education: experimenting on someone else¶s children; fighting for
the right to learn in New Orleans,´ CounterPunch, August 6, 2007, www.counterpunch.org/quigley08062007.html.

15 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 118; and Zein El-Amine and Lee Glazer, ³µEvolution¶ or destruction? A
look at Washington, D.C.,´ in Keeping the Promise?, 53.

16 Leigh Dingerson, ³Unlovely: How the market is failing the children of New Orleans,´ Keeping the Promise?, 17.

17 Bill Quigley, ³Fighting for the right to learn: the public education experiment in New Orleans two years after
Katrina,´ Black Agenda Report, August 8, 2007,
www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?Itemid=33&id=307&option=com_content&task=view.

18 ³No experience necessary: How the New Orleans school experiment devalues experienced teachers.´ A joint
report of the United Teachers New Orleans, Louisiana Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of
Teachers, June 2007.Available online at www.aft.org/presscenter/releases/downloads/NoExperReport_07.pdf.

19 ³Privatization and the Katrina Solution,´ Michael Molina interviewed by Gillian Russom and Sarah Knopp,
Socialist Worker, May 28, 2008.

20 U.S. Census Bureau, ³School expenditures, by type of control and level of instruction in constant (2003-2004)
dollars, 1970-2004,´ www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2007/tables/07s0205.xls.

21 Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 115.

22 Brian C. Hassell and Thomas Toch, ³Big box: how the heirs of the Wal-Mart fortune have fueled the charter
school movement,´ November 7, 2006, Education Sector Connecting the Dots series,
www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=422193. John Walton died in a plane crash in 2005.

23 Quoted in Bill Berkowitz, ³Philanthropy the Wal-Mart way,´ Media Transparency, October 12, 2005,
www.mediatransparency.com/story.php?storyID=88.
24 Joe Allen, ³The horrible house of Walton,´ Socialist Worker, December 2, 2005. See ³Shopping for subsidies:
how Wal-Mart uses taxpayer money to finance its never-ending growth,´ Good Jobs First, May 2004; Amy Joyce,
³Labor deal with Wal-Mart criticized,´ Washington Post, November 1, 2005.

25 Steve Miller and Jack Gerson, ³The corporate surge against public schools,´
www.educatorroundtable.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=718.

26 See the Ed in ¶08 site at www.edin08.com.

27 ³Strong American schools: mission possible: Greensboro, North Carolina,´ Ed in ¶08,

www.edin08.com/uploadedFiles/FAQs/SAS.MissionPossible.Nov14.2007.pdf.

28 Green Dot¶s Board of Directors includes SEIU Local 1877¶s president, Mike Garcia. SEIU has a very cozy
relationship with those sections of Corporate America who have government contract services, and has a plan to
³organize´ charter schools, but they intend to do so by making deals with charter operators who will undermine
some of the key elements of teachers¶ power in collective bargaining.

29 Howard Blume, ³Mayor pushes school bonds,´ Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2008.

30 Howard Fine, ³Unsentimental education,´ Los Angeles Business Journal, June 4, 2007.

31 Mary Compton and Lois Weiner, eds., The Global Assault on Teachers and Their Unions: Stories for Resistance,
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

32 ³The politics of education reform: Bolstering supply and demand; Overcoming institutional blocks.´ World Bank
documents and reports. http://www-
wds.worldbank.org:80/servlet/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=

523679&entityID=000094946_01082504044865.

33 Helen Huntley, ³Legislators, teachers balk at deal for Edison Schools,´ St. Petersburg Times, September 26,
2003, www.sptimes.com/2003/09/26/Businness/Legislators__?teachers.shtml.

34 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 108.

35 Miller and Gerson, ³Corporate surge against public schools.´

36 Editorial, New York Times, August 27, 2006.

37 Martin Conroy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Richard Rothstein. The Charter School Dustup:
Examining Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (Washington: Economic Policy Institute, 2005).

38 See ³Charter schools indicators: a report,´ 10.

39 Quoted in Klonsky and Klonsky, Small Schools, 145.

40 Sarah Carr, ³Getting into New Orleans schools can be a tough task,´ New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 17,
2008.

41 See ³Charter schools indicators: a report,´ 15.

42 Ibid., 16.
43 Ibid., 8.

44 See www.greendot.org/school_model.

45 Sam Dillon, ³Maverick leads charge for charter schools,´ New York Times, July 24, 2004.

46 Larry Abramson, ³For charter schools, New Orleans is a citywide lab,´ NPR, July 16, 2008.

47 Leo Casey, ³Who¶s afraid of teacher voice? Charter schools and union organizing,´ November 17, 2005, Edwise,
http://edwize.org/whos-afraid-of-teacher-voice-charter-schools-and-union-organizing.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid.

50 Personal communication.

51 See ³Agreement between Green Dot Public Schools, a California not-for-profit corporation and the Asociacion
de Maestros Unidos/CTA/NEA effective through June 30, 2010.´ An earlier version of the contract is available
online at http://amunidos.org/pdf_docs/AMUContractFinal%20FY2006.pdf.

52 Ibid.

53 Marazan, Cesar Rosado. ³SEIU to Raid Union Representing 40,000 Teachers in Puerto Rico.´ Labor Notes
Online, www.?labornotes.org/node/1517.

54 Greg Toppo, ³Sharpton, education plan may tear union ties,´ USA Today June 11, 2008.

55 Therese Quinn, Erica Meiners, Bill Ayers, ³Child soldiers,´ ?January 8, 2008,
http://billayers.wordpress.com/2008/01/09/child-soldiersby-therese-quinn-erica-meiners-bill-ayers/.

56 Jesse Sharkey, ³Get the military out of our schools,´ Socialist Worker, October 14, 2008.

57 See Dan French, ³Boston¶s pilot schools: an alternative to charter schools´ in Keeping the Promise?, 67.